Why PS4 Will Never Have Backward Compatibility

ASidCast: "This year at E3 2015 Bethesda, Microsoft, Sony, Ubisoft, EA and Square Enix all had surprises in store for us. Some were brand new franchises, others were re-invented games. This year’s E3 will go down in history as one of the most competitive one ever. Slowly however as all that hot fuzz from E3 2015 is subsiding, and people finally came to their senses; hype was replaced by questions. Why was Shenmue 3 a kickstarter on Sony’s stage? When is the Final Fantasy VII remake actually going to release? When will PS4 get its Backward Compatibility?

While I don’t know the answer to the first 2 questions, I can hazard a guess at the 3rd. The answer is never."

Who cares if it increases sales? It's a great feature that'll eventually give people the option to play 100s of old games that they already own or will be able to pick up for really cheap, and you're here worried about sales lol. Too funny.

I've seen people ask for BC and remakes all generation and now that MS has given a viable option, people find something negative about it

Dude people want less games now lmao that's a first. They also don't want to play old games anymore but they want ff 7 lmaoooo some people just make things way too obvious. Microsoft has won the console war with bc and if sony wants to compete, they better do it as well.

'microsoft has won the console war'... That's as delusional as it gets. Final fantasy 7 remake is not on ps3.

It's great players will be able to play older games on their xone, hoping tales of vesperia and lost odyssey will be available.

I still have my ps1,2 and 3 so BC isn't a big deal for me personally regarding Playstation, as soon as Tales of zestiria was confirmed for ps4 my ps3 was put to sleep, plus being able to emulate on pc helps too.

Now the X1 has it coming for free after launch, but you have to wait for your games to be ready. That's pretty lame that you have to download the game and wait for the game to be compatible. The X1 at this rate won't be fully BC until the end of the generation.

There's no point in crying over a feature that isn't possible on the system.

Besides if you took time to read my comments you'll see that I do believe that BC is a nice feature but if it isn't possible it just isn't possible.

I don't see why I have to remain bitter over something like that and spend countless hours demanding an impossible feature from Sony. Which is why in extremely mad at those that decided to go with the Cell in the PS3. If they went with X86 or a simpler power PC architecture we would be enjoying BC on our systems.

Having worked on plenty of porting between disparate architectures I don't think it's impossible to add BC to the ps4. You probably wouldn't use a typical emulator, transcoding of some kind will likely work better.

Sadly, nothing ever matters if it isn't on a sony platform. It's funny how good ideas are asinine if sony does not have it. It's a shame sony would rather charge you to stream your whole backlog, especially when you are a loyal customer. I literally have over 100 ps3 games that i'd love to play on my ps4. So i guess games i haven't really got to play yet like, the puppeteer, nino kuni, the tales series, ico/shadow of the collosus are all irrelevent now since ps4 is out.

I'm with you man. I'm actually very upset at Sony atm because they made sure to break into my house and kill my PS3 shortly after the PS4 came out. now I have this huge library of PS3 games that I can't play...sniff sniff.. Leave Britney aloooone!

But all jokes aside though, I really wish there was a some sort of way out there for people to play their PS3 games. I'm going to call Sony and ask why isn't there a way for people out there to play their PS3 games. In my opinion that is ludicrous and Sony SHOULD be held accountable.

BC for the XBox One is not out right now but at least for the Xbox 360 owners out there, there is hope that soon they will be able to play their Xbox 360 games. Some of them can't wait to play Gears of War, while playing Gears of War remastered. Yes! an inception WITHIN an inception my friend! It's kind of like how with Oculus Rift on Xbox one, you can sit in your living room and put on the headset and simulate you sitting in a room playing video games. A weird paradox, but a megaton nonetheless!

A quick little pole; How many people would choose BC over Shareplay? just curious...

Sure and while your at it you can raise an army called the BC Salvation Army and invade Sonys headquarters. Maybe you can use the dark sorcerer to magically install BC compatibility into our systems.

-sarcasm-

I think you would have learned something from NaughtyDog but you didn't. And that's the fact that it's extremely difficult to get PS3 games to work on the PS4 due to the difference in architecture. That's probably why we will never get it. If anyone's to blame its crazy Ken and his wonderful Cell processor.

because i dont have a fast enough internet line to download 8GBs in a few hours or even a few weeks. on top of that to download 30-40 games, yeah, its never going to happen. and when i do get a fast enough internet line in my area, chances are the Xone will be obsolete.

so yeah, even if i was to get a xone, its a feature i know i wont use....ever.

dont get me wrong though, im just one, i know some people that have fast internet who will make use of the feature, and it is a great feature to have. but yeah, for me BC or lack of it on the PS4 is not a deal breaker. im pretty happy with mines.

Same naysayers are celebrating Prototype being remastered for PS4! I mean -___- !!

It's the most requested feature on the Xbox forums and yet some people claim it's an irrelevant feature. They claim it's no longer needed so far into the generation because the new consoles have more games now...remastered games!

Let's also not forget that there are still millions of late adopters, the majority of gamers in fact, who have yet made the jump to gen now and being able to play hundreds of games that you already own for free on your new console is a great incentive to upgrade.

The same naysayers jizzed themselves over PSNow as a way to play PS3 games again (for a fee with lag and Internet dependency) and now are claiming it's for newcomers who don't necessarily have consoles. I mean come on! You hypocrites just love flipping the script so that it fits the narrative that gives you comfort.

If people want to continue paying for ways to play what they already own then kudos to them, PSNow and remastered games are for them. Just don't try minimize the importance of being able to play RDR or Skyrim again for free on the Xbox One.

Funny thing is if BC really matters then whats the point for Gears Remaster? Shouldnt u just scrap that since BC was announced? Just saying. Also if BC was such a big deal then why didnt it come out at launch? Dont get me wrong MS announcing BC was a good move but its nothing that will make gamers jump ship. FF7 & Shemue 3 though will attract gamers from all sides. Glad uguys are happy with your BC though.

Edit: MasterCornholio I understand that but I feel if your going to announce a feature such as BC & make it a big deal then u only show that u are trying to milk gamers if u have BC & continue making remasters. Thats just my opinion.

FF7 & Shemue 3 exclusive? Gears 1 remakes.. with gears 2 & 3 BC. I can revisit the entire series and continue with Gears 4 into next-gen. I can play all of the Mass Effect (if annouced..it probably will it's EA) which I missed out on last Gen and continue Red Dead Redemption where I left of which is 40 minutes into the game hopefully 2 is announced soon for next-gen. Just want to give you an example how it could help having BC on next Gen.

This would also help dev. Get more exposure and gamers to gets more sequals over remasters.

believe what you want but lack of BC is the main reason i sold the ps4 and moved over to a gaming pc .i couldnt believe it wasnt bc with ps3 i also have a Wii U that i got a great deal on and i love that i can play og wii games on it since i missed mk wii ssbb pikmin 2 etc.and really wanted to give those games a go. same with x360 ...never owned one so id have a pretty good backlog to rock

Idk why people are arguing for less features on consoles. Just because some people do t care for it doesn't mean everyone should feel the same way. Just offer the feature and let the consumer decide whether they'll use it or not.

PS4 wont be backwards compatible because the cell architecture is radically different, and far more complex than the x86 architecture they used for the ps4. Lets take a look historically at backwards compatibility...

PS1 games are supported by the PS2/PS3/PSP/Vita. Take a look at the specs of the PS1 they are extremely low and was emulated even back in the 90's with Bleem.

PS2 games are supported by 2 early models of the PS3. The first model was hardware based with the PS2's emotion engine inside the console, compatibility was generally good with some games having some technical issues. This naturally was part of what made the PS3 so damn expensive at launch, and so to cut costs Sony scrapped the hardware emulation for software emulation which brings us to the second model. The second model that supported PS2 games did so via software emulation, unlike the first model many games had a number of technical issues and so Sony scrapped it altogether.

PS3 games cannot be emulated on a PS4. Its pretty simple if powerhouse PC's cannot emulate the complexity of the PS3 what makes you think the PS4 which is essentially a mid range PC would be able to? Sure Sony knows the ins and outs of the PS3, but that doesnt make the PS4 any more powerful. This in my opinion is a non issue, the only people this truly affects are those who cannot afford the price tag of next gen and need to trade in their PS3.

I personally have my original PS3 and PS4 hooked up side by side, and with those 2 machines i can play 99.9% of the games released in Playstation's 20 year history.

PS3 and the 360 had powerPC architecture. PS4 and the X1 have x86 architecture. It may be more difficult to emulate Ps3 games on the PS4 than it is to emulate 360 games on the X1 but it isn't impossible.

The Cell Engine is comprised of one powerpc based PPE and 8 SPEs. Of those 8 SPEs, 1 is a spare, 1 is dedicated to the OS, with the remaining 6 used for the game. Programmers have been trying for YEARS to get PS3 emulation off the ground on PC with little success. Explain to me how the under powered PS4 would achieve this goal? I'll wait...

And that powerPC PPE is the "brain" of the cell processor that controls and manages the SPEs. PS3 has powerPC architecture.

Also there aren't any working 360 emulators either and is considered by the emulation scene a difficult console to emulate. Did that stop MS? Could you explain to me why MS managed to do it on a console that has the equivalent specs of a mid range PC when the emulation scene couldn't do it with high end PCs?

The only reason for Sony to not put BC on the PS4 is PS Now. If they really wanted BC Sony's engineers would find a way to do it just like MS engineers did.

@Imalwaysright "Also there aren't any working 360 emulators either and is considered by the emulation scene a difficult console to emulate. Did that stop MS? Could you explain to me why MS managed to do it on a console that has the equivalent specs of a mid range PC when the emulation scene couldn't do it with high end PCs?"

That is because (1) the 360's customized PPC was essentially just a Triple Core IBM PPC Processor (it was not a custom architecture beyond that like the Cell was - they were both different beasts) and (2) Microsoft is most likely recompiling the executable binaries with the Xbox One (hence the reason you need to "download" a backwards compatible version). Microsoft would probably be doing full on emulation if they were running the game from the 360 disc, but NOTHING is copied from the disc - it is only there for verification.

Thank you @gamespawn for the reply, and like @uth11 stated "It's not that the ps4 couldn't emulate the ps3. It's that nobody would like the results, so why waste the engineering effort?".

With that said i have tried some of the games being offered in the beta and the list mostly consists of XBL Arcade games and a few launch titles. These launch titles, as it stands do not run very well with mass effect actually slowing down to an unplayable crawl in my experience. If it cant even handle launch titles what can we really expect from more complex games that pushed the 360 to its limits?

Whats the point of backwards compatibility if it doesn't function well? The PS3 already tried software emulation and the moral of that story was that software emulation is going to always have its issues. I would honestly rather have nothing than this half baked, and ham fisted attempt at backwards compatibility.

The only thing I'm hearing from the well known PS fanboys on this website is that the PS3 didn't have great games. Must be the only reason why they don't think that BC would make their console of choice (PS4) better than it already is.

Exactly. I mean only reason this is such a big deal is because MS did it. I guarantee if Sony announced BC & MS announced FF7 Remake & Shenmue 3 xbox fanboys wouldve said the same thing as sony fanboys & BC wouldve been nothing major. Good example was the tombraider exclusive announcement. Remember how huge that was? Now u add FF7 Remake & Shenmue 3 to the mix & tombraider exclusive deal is ancient history now. If BC really beat out FF7 Remake & Shenmue 3 announcement then u must have started gaming last gen to think so. Like I said MS did a great job with the BC announcement but me personally wont lose any sleep over it. Istill have 2 ps3's that work fine to play my ps3 games.

BC is now a feature MS can use to distinguish its brand from Sony's Playstation. Whether its widly used or not its a point of difference. In terms of anyone thinking BC is a negative, given it costs nothing, is absolutely perplexing to me. Its also not like MS took any features away to make it happen.

The X1 could easily use the slogan whoch helped Sony turn around the fortunes of the PS3 last gen...It Only Does Everything.

The thing about BC is that it means I don't have to have every console from every gen hooked up at the same time to play an older game if I want. It would reduce clutter, so it would be convenient to have.

I'm at least hoping that for the future they give you free access on PSNow to games you already own.

It did, when I bought it at launch, soon Sony pulled the rug from under my feet. Its funny, Nintendo add features and get criticised for it, Sony take features away and sell shed load of consoles as a result. Also the being forced to subscribe to PS+ just to play games online.

Sony always did have the best first party games so PS4 having backwards compatibility would be awesome. I sold my ps3 last summer so it's a shame I'll never get to play and finish Ratchet and Clank Into the Nexus, Beyond Two Souls, Puppeteer, Kingdom Hearts remaster etc.